One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

1)Herbert Hoover: In 1927 Hoover was Secretary of
Commerce under President Calvin
Coolidge; yet while Coolidge generally maintained his administration’s laissez
faire, small-government attitude in the flood’s aftermath, refusing almost
all federal intervention in or aide to the stricken states and communities,
Hoover took a different approach. His hands-on management
of the flood relief camps in particular (despite the racial inequities on
which my third focal figure here focused) received widespread national acclaim,
and helped propel the previously unknown Hoover toward his successful 1928
nomination for and election to the presidency. It’s one of the great ironies of
American history, though, that it was Great Depression migrant camps—which came
to be called Hoovervilles—which contributed significantly to Hoover’s
subsequent loss to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Disaster
relief giveth and disaster relief taketh away.

2)Huey Long: Hoover wasn’t the only political
candidate to benefit greatly from the 1927 flood’s effects and aftermath. Long
had unsuccessfully run for Governor of Louisiana in 1924, and in the years
since had continued his populist activism as a member of the Louisiana
Public Service Commission. The 1927 flood allowed
Long to leverage those longstanding populist attitudes and actions into
more direct critiques of New Orleans elites, the state’s government
bureaucracy, and their concurrent failures to look after the impoverished and
working-class communities most affected by the flood. As this
Slate article argues, the 1927
flood ushered in a new era of public calls for government intervention and aid;
yet it’s equally important to tie those changing attitudes to populist
movements like Long’s, which throughout the South almost always flirted with
white supremacism and organizations like the Klan. Long himself
was no friend of the Klan, to be clear; but as my next figure makes clear,
populist responses to the 1927 flood were inseparable from the region’s systems
of racial prejudice and segregation.

3)W.E.B. Du Bois: As I highlighted in
this post, and as a river park in
his hometown of Great Barrington (MA) commemorates, Du Bois had a lifelong,
multi-layered attachment to rivers, and his strong interest in the flood and
its aftermath was likely tied to that personal perspective. Yet as this
wonderful exhibit at the National Museum of African American History &
Culture makes clear, both the 1927 flood itself and the subsequent disparities
in relief efforts disproportionately affected African Americans, giving even a
less personally interested activist and journalist more than enough reason to
cover the story at length (as Du Bois did in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, which he edited). Moreover,
the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Southern African Americans amplified the
already-underway Great Migration, further shifting the nation’s racial and
cultural demographics in profound and lasting ways. As usual, W.E.B. Du Bois has
a great deal to tell us about those interconnected histories and effects of
this singular yet telling disaster.

Last
DisasterStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you
think? Other historical or contemporary disasters you’d highlight?

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#NoConfederateSyllabus

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